Back

Pseudotime graph diffusion for post hoc visualization of inferred single-cell trajectories

Lukas, B. E.; Pang, J.; Koh, T. J.; Dai, Y. E.

2026-01-30 bioinformatics
10.64898/2026.01.27.702126 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Visual representations are widely used to interpret trajectories in single-cell data; however, they do not always faithfully capture inferred trajectory structure. As a result, interpretation of cellular dynamics and downstream analyses may be compromised. Here, we present Pseudotime Graph Diffusion (PGD), a lightweight and interpretable post hoc framework for smoothing cell-level features along pseudotime. PGD operates by performing random-walk diffusion on a pseudotime graph, propagating information along inferred trajectory paths to enhance continuity and structure. We demonstrate that PGD-smoothed embeddings improve visualization of increasingly complex inferred trajectories of monocytes and macrophages during wound healing. We further show that PGD extends naturally to trajectory-aware gene expression smoothing. By improving agreement between visual representations and inferred trajectories, PGD enables more faithful interpretation of dynamic cellular processes.

Matching journals

The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.